Ooops… I did it again

According to a report this morning in The Seattle Times, King County Elections Director Dean Logan believes there may be another 162 absentee ballots that had been erroneously rejected because workers couldn’t find signatures on file.

Goldy- the cynical MAY be hitting the fan. Reasonable Republicans who have been standing behind Dean Logan are now backing off…

Logan needs to understand it is now NOT just about getting those votes counted that he believes should have been counted last time- it is NOW about getting those votes counted that should have been counted last time- what ever portion of the 573 plus 162 they are- IN A MANNER THAT RESTORES CREDIBILITY RAPIDLY BEING LOST IN KING COUNTY.

That involves, as badly as I hate to agree with the GOP Politbiuro chair, a written report on each ballot, laying out the problem, the reasons the problem occurred, and giving the chain of custody for each ballot from receipt by the Elections Department- in a timely manner- until delivery to the King County Canvassing Board.

In many ways, it is the equivalent of having to write on the blackboard 735 (573 plus 162) times- “I will not fail to scan in signatures. I will not misplace ballots. Under penalty of summary firing from my cozy county job, I will not screw up another King County election.”

BUT IT ALLOWS a debate and settlement at the Canvassing Board of the issues- then put it to rest.

One final change needed- Dean Logan needs to step down from the King County Canvassing Board. He cannot credibly sit in judgement of his staff’s errors. As any Deputy Auditor he would designate would have the same credibility problem- and it is problematic that a CHANGE can be made during an election canvasss- he needs to absent himself from the proceedings, thus requiring Dwight Pelz (D) and Dan Satterberg (R) to reach agreement.

Oh, the cold night panic of loosing- Rossi kindred folk are sounding like sore loosers….and he is still ahead…….

All this drama in a smaller county that did not have the potential to overturn their small lead would not arouse a sleeping dog.

No new election, FINISH counting the legal ballots in King County, send Christine to the big dance.

NEXT, the bloody session. Can hear the howlding already as all the right wing dreams evaporate.

I am so glad the Democrats found their backbone, three cheers for the leaders and donors.

Josef – you seem a nice fellow- Please remember King County has had this power over your life for many decades. Nothing sinister, just population. Hard working people stacked a bit. Take solice, Gregoire is from a smaller county, Thruston. Some bonding potential there, I hope.

Bob- Rossi is gaining in King County at this point- seems the parties get inside info that is not shared with media or public. I am working to change that.

At this point, I am more concerned that we have a governor- her or him- who the vast bulk of the people will see as legitimate, if not perfectly elected, or their particular choice. Because of its mass, and the nature of its problems, King County is undermining that legitimacy. Steps need to be taken to restore credibility, for whomever wins. And Dean Logan sitting in judgement of himself and his staff doesn’t cut it anymore.

Bob, I’m not griping about Adams reducing Dino by 5, nor am I griping about Snohomish reducing Dino’s margin by 44. Those results, while unexpected, flow from transparent and properly working processes. The same with Island County reducing Dino’s edge, and so forth. But King County has just gotten to the point that I am having an almost impossible time now trying to defend the credibility of our electoral system to most of the people I know. And I’d think you’d concede I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few days DEFENDING our system, no matter the result.

Having Dean Logan sit as judge and jury on his own mistakes is somewhat like having Jeb Bush sit as judge and jury in Florida 2000 – no, wait, Jeb recused himself from the statewide canvassing board in Florida, because he didn’t want to taint the results, whatever they were. Logan must step down from the canvassing board. This would be one change in midstream that is necessary to try to restore any faith in the process, though I don’t know that possible at this point. It may be too late.

*cross posted at sound politics* Sam Reed was on the Mike Siegel show this morning, declaring whole heartedly that the decisions of the County Canvassing boards are the final say according to the law, the Supreme Court decision says that the parties can’t forcibly demand the canvassing boards to recanvass, but the canvassing boards can recanvass if they believe a gross error has occurred, and that even though he is a republican, he is at odds with what Vance is trying to do to court to seek an injunction of the 573 votes, because they do have a chain of command.

This would be why I voted for him instead of Rudderman, because, even though I’m a democrat, I recognize a fair decision, and he has the cojones to read the law as what the law says.

Jim – I know you’ve been very reasonable through this whole thing, and although we don’t see eye-to-eye on who we’d like as Governer, I respect your opinion. That said, I’m not sure I feel that any discoveries taint the election. Personally, I feel the hand recount is supposed to ferret out things like that.

I understand that it’s vitally important to make sure the 162 + 573 + 22 ballots are secured and dealt with very carefully, but their discovery doesn’t make me doubt the quality of the election workers in our most populous county. As I’ve pointed out several times, what it does make me doubt is that we need so many different methods of voting and collecting/verifying votes. That seems to be the recipe for disaster.

I will admit that I am reflexively against the Republican’s lawsuit (because I think they’re full of **it with their moaning and wailing about “fairness”), but I will also admit that it couldn’t hurt to take some steps (if they haven’t been taken) to establish the timeline for the three separate sets of ballots and make sure they’re all accounted for properly. I’m guessing that’s what Dean Logan is doing despite Chris Vance’s partisan rhetoric.

New day, new bunch of ballots “discovered” in King County. How much more ridiculous can this get and how long can even the D’s continue to look beyond the so very obvious fraud and otherwise “funny” stuff being done by their own elected officials? From the top down, Ron Sims to the bottom rung of KC government, including all appointed offices, they all should be canned: immediately. It’s not just the R’s in KC who are being taken for a ride here; it’s the entire populace of KC. If more folks can’t see that, then maybe they do deserve it, but the rest of us in the state do not deserve it and because of the way it works, we’re going to be left holding the bag. We, at this registered voter address, will be doing everything we can to no longer buy anything that is taxable in this state. It will be a little more work, but doable, and my state sales tax dollars might as well be money in my pocket rather than in the hip pocket of government officials such as what King County has.

162 MORE ballots. I don’t care if Logan is the best person at his job in the country. At this point, the man should be fired for being unable to perform his most basic task, counting ALL the ballots.

In the end, we have only one person to blame for what will always be viewed as a tainted election, regardless of the winner, and that is Dean Logan. Keeping him would be like having the Mariners commit a record number of errors in a season, winning only 30 games, and then retaining the manager.

jcricket- I’m more concerned now about the APPEARANCE of Dean Logan sitting in judgement of himself and his staff. In most situations like this, in administrative hearings or in the courts, Logan would have to recuse himself.

NOT because he’s done anything bad- this guy has done a miracle in turning King County Elections around. And he’s gotten it 99.999% right.

And if it is the two remaining canvassing boards bipartisanly okaying the legitimate ballots- signatures match, etc- out of that batch of ballots, it looks GOOD.

Jim – your argument isn’t unreasonable, avoiding the appearance of impropriety is usually a good thing. Unfortunately, I think there’s nothing that any Democraticly-leaning county can do that seems “proper” to Republicans, so I’m not inclined to worry about it.

And I seriously doubt that firing Dean Logan will do anything to fix these problems in the future. It would make some Republicans feel smugly happy and then this kind of thing would keep on happening. Far better to keep the experienced (well-recommended) manager in charge, and light a fire under the underlings to do better next time.

Better yet, light a fire under the legislature to move us towards a single statewide voting system (voter-verifiable audit-trail touch screens or all vote-by-mail).

It’s laughable that people in Washington are agonizing over a tiny handful of missing ballots and doing all this hand-wringing about error rates of less than 0.1%. Take a look at this AP story out of North Carolina today to see what happens when elections are really messed up:

GASTONIA, N.C. – Two local elections officials resigned after investigations revealed mishandling of vote tallies in Gaston County, including more than 13,000 ballots that weren’t discovered until after Election Day.

Sandra Page, elections director, and Tony Branch, chairman of the elections board, resigned Wednesday following a closed-door meeting of the board.

The counsel for the state board, Don Wright, had questioned Page for two days about the county’s numerous problems on Election Day, including a failure by poll workers to check the number of ballots cast against the number of people recorded as voting.

The county failed to include more than 13,000 ballots — nearly one in five of those cast — in its unofficial election results. The tally was later updated, but dozens of ballots cast at curbside by voters who could not walk into a precinct may not have been counted, officials said.

“We have made a few errors and we have been guilty of ignorance, but we are cognizant of what those issues are now,” said county elections board member Richard Jordan.

Neither Page nor Branch commented on the board’s decision as they left the meeting.

Last month, Page blamed discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters on precinct workers who failed to follow instructions. “We’re sitting here victims of what happens out there, and we get the blame for it,” she said.

Almost 64,000 ballots were cast Nov. 2 in the county, which is west of Charlotte.”

Jim is correct, in fact I’ve also been saying that Logan has to step-down, in order for either candidate to have any credibility to govern for days now. While I don’t believe anything nefarious or evil has gone on, many of the rest of the folks in the real world sure do. I don’t know if he would do it but Ralph Munro, would be an excellent replacement on the canvassing board. He is the gold standard for ethics, honesty and would give much needed credibility to the winner.

Perhaps Dean Logan should recuse himself, but I hardly think that Ralph Munro is a good “neutral” replacement. He’s doing his best as a Republican party mouthpiece (I wouldn’t expect any less), now calling for a “change of the rules” with a runoff election. I don’t put him in the same category as Chris “the sky is falling, no wait, the ground is moving” Vance, but he’s not an impartial observer.

Again, I’m not impuning Mr. Munro’s motives, just saying that replacing Dean Logan with a well-known Republican (or Democrat) who has been speaking up as a Republican supporter isn’t going to provide me any more comfort.

At this point I think the Republicans and Democrats are each doing “the right thing” – using the law to their advantage, as best they can. That’s how all the checks and balances in our government (and courts) should work (IMHO).

All this being said, if Gregoire loses this third count, I expect her to concede. If Rossi loses, I expect Republicans to sue or press the legislature to make a new law calling for a new election. In that situation, I think Democrats should just let the Rs bluster and stammer. Nothing to lose.

I just don’t see any reason (besides Republican requests) for King County or Democrats to acceed to any demands at this point. Nearly all of the calls for stopping the count are coming from Republicans, so please forgive me if I’m not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

(Jim, I understand that you’re one of those rare people who may actually be interested in “getting to the truth”, but most of the people calling for stopping the vote county are like Chris Vance).

How about all vote-by-mail using optical scan ballots with the state providing a special oval-shaped pen/stamp and better envelopes that ensures nearly 100% machine-readability.

And a voter-verifiable audit trail on the Internet (i.e. I can go to a web site and verify that my vote was received, processed, counted, and I didn’t over and/or undervote).

Is that so hard? I understand that displaying the actual contents of my ballot might run afoul of various “vote buying” regulations, but surely not just displaying a ballot number and whether it was accepted/rejected over/under-voted (for each race/initiative).

After sleeping on it, I’ve changed my mind. In King County, there were 876,903 votes for governor. Including the 713 misprocessed and 22 misplaced ballots means including a 0.008% counting error in King County. Please note that I double checked the math and it is 8-thousandths of a percent, or 8-in-a-hundred-thousand is another way to put the magnitude of the King County error.

Actually, Dean Logan could defend his staff pretty easily, I think, just by repeating “8 in one hundred thousand ballots were mishandled.”

That is a small, small number. A small error in the state’s largest county will give the states largest adjustment to the total. What could make more sense?

X – Given the evidence I’ve seen, the 573 ballots were legally/properly received and then illegaly/improperly rejected, so the number ballots in question problem is even smaller (under 200).

The 22 are up in the air, and the 162 to a lesser-extent (I haven’t seen a good enough explanation of why those weren’t found with the original 573, considering they were part of the same improper rejection).

At any rate, .008% “worse than machine problem” errors is a pretty good error rate. And .002% or .0005% is damn near perfect.

By “worse than machine” I mean there were obviously other errors corrected during the 2nd machine count and this hand-recount that were completely expected (the ballots accidentally fed through twice, ballots that got munched by a machine, poorly filled in ovals, etc.).

The errors for the 573, 162 and 22 are of a different sort. Really the only ones that seem obviously questionable are the 22, because no one is saying those were secure (even if the envelopes look good).

Bob’s idea that we go to “all mail” balloting is not a solution; it compounds the problem. It is the mail-in and provisional ballots that hav been lost, stayed, stolen or had problems in verification.,

This episode actually argues for people going to the polls if they want to be sure their vote really counts.

And while I’m at it, if all the current ballots on the table are counted….. can we be sure there aren’t other lost ballotrs somewhere else?

Dick – Using Oregon as an example it doesn’t appear to compound the problem. If we’re all using vote by mail, and we mail in to one central place, we can use the staff currently required to sit at each polling place to provide additional scrutiny and security for all the ballots coming in.

I agree with Jim, I’m quite impressed by the levelheaded discussion going on today… though some of that may be due to the fact that people like Chuck and Cynical have abandoned us.

A couple observations….

Jim… I’m afraid I agree with Cricket that there is very little that King County Elections can do right now to allay the fears and concerns being raised by Republicans. Logan recusing himself at this point would be trumpeted by Pirate Vance and his paranoid parrots on the right-wing blogs as confirmation that he and the process thus far cannot be trusted. Besides, from a PR perspective, the only canvassing board vote that counts anymore is Satterberg’s. I hope he is as responsible as you suggest.

As to suggestions for electoral reform, I encourage the discussion, and plan to establish a permanent thread on the topic. But I should point out, that problems at the heart of the dispute in King County are not due to any particular technology or process in general, but to the nature of processing over half a million absentee ballots. As has been stated, even if you consider these 723 as tabulation errors, the county’s tabulation error rate is still well below those in the CalTech/MIT studies.

Furthermore, focusing reforms on fixing a very small error rate in an excruciatingly close election that is the equivalent of a 100-year flood, may not be the most effective use of our energies. We certainly need to analyze what happened in King, and try to fix it, but let’s not ignore some other necessary reforms.

For example, voter verifiable paper trails, and open-source software for all voting and tabulation machines are at the top of my list.

This is a great site. Have been reading for a couple of weeks and just about ready to join in. There is lot at stake in staying the course and letting this count proceed and live with the results- all done next week.

Ralph Munro is giveing in to the partisan fears that Rossi might not pull it off. Too bad, should have worked harder. That is the message theat Gregoire is getting, should have campaigned better. It is winner take all, two party, blood and guts American politics. Keep wondering what all the faint of heart stuff is about?

You invest millions, campaing hard for months to win and it is close. Record almost 3 million votes. Well, c’est la vie.

Goldy- I agree that Vance would trumpet like hell- but would it add to credibility with the bulk of population? This isn’t about the showhorses…

And yes, we don’t want to stay fixated on all the little problems- but we don’t want to ignore systemic error where exposed. I remain more concerned about sloppiness at DOL (not forwarding registrations) and post office error, and how do we handle third party screw-ups?

And verifiable technology that is easy to use at the interface.

I remember the fight in Pierce County over punchcards. People TRUSTED the old lever machines (which were not verifiable, and you could not reconstruct the vote- the mechanical equivalent of some of today’s electronic systems) and HATED the proposed punchcard (which was nothing more than a high-tech paper ballot- verifiable, reconstructable- but unfamiliar). Elections would be easy if it wasn’t for the voters…

I remember the fight in Pierce County over punchcards. People TRUSTED the old lever machines (which were not verifiable, and you could not reconstruct the vote- the mechanical equivalent of some of today’s electronic systems) and HATED the >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Jim King, let me refresh your memory a bit, the old lever machines were very recountable as well as verifyable with a paper record that was kept on file for 7 years. Admitedly though a bit more expensive to operate as well as heavy as hell. But they were paid for. The voters voted to retain these machines but the state came down with a mandate requiring replacement of them….

Chuck- the “paper record” was the printout of totals from the machine- if the machine malfunctioned- and they did (they still are in New York City)- you could not recover the actual votes. A recount was reopening the back of the machines and writing down the totals from each machine, and adding up those totals. There was NO WAY to reconsitute a ballot. At least the Snohomish and Yakima electronic machines are capable of printing out a paper record of each ballot cast- you couldn’t do that with the old lever machines.

No need to refresh my memory Chuck- I was there once when a machine failed…

The CEO of VoteHere gave a lecture that I attended where he pointed out that accusations of election fraud and election problems are nothing new. He did a LexisNexis search and found a similar number of articles about election issues every year going back to before 1900. What’s also telling is that time new technology is introduced it’s always claimed to “eliminate the possibility of fraud” and “eliminate the error rate” associated with the old technology.

To a certain extent that’s true. Each new technology does improve the error/fraud rate, but also introduces new problems. Traditional paper-ballots were very susceptible to ballot box stuffing. Lever ballot machines could be “undetectably hacked” (in a sense) to record votes for a different candidate. Punch cards have “chad” problems (not just in FL 2000). Optical scan ballots can get stuck together or have problems with certain types of pens, stray marks, etc. And as we all know, closed-source touch-screen computers can be hacked from the inside or the outside, and without an audit trail, there’s no way to verify what’s happened.

It seems that with our trillion-dollar economy we could throw a couple million at this problem and have our top University researchers and NSA spooks work out this issue so the voting standard would live up to our American ideal. Seems a crime to have the core engine of our democracy in the hands of a few for-profit companies without safeguards in place.

And Goldy – thanks. I think it’s pretty clear that no one involved in elections should listen to anyone on “the other side” (or in the case of a county worker, either side) telling them to step down, give up, go away, etc. Certainly their motives aren’t pure of heart.

If you were a basketball coach, and you felt the ref was being fair, would you listen to the other team’s coach who wants the ref to quit? Doubt it. If the other coach gave you strategy advice to tell you how your team could earn more respect, would you take it? Doubt it.

That’s what’s happening here. I know there are some (Jim) in the middle who really believe that there’s some way to achieve impartiality here, but I know that won’t be the case. Dean Logan or the Democrats do anything the Republicans ask, and the Republicans use it as another “weakness” to attack. I don’t think the Democrats are doing anything untoward, and I think they have everything to lose from changing their strategy.

This issue is all the “rage” these days – Dems letting Repubs “frame” the message and then having to claw their way up to level the playing field. It’s about time we said, “Uh-uh. I don’t accept your premise. That’s now how I see the issue. This is how it works” Then let the Republicans defend themselves.

Jim, the totals were the totals for each canidate were on a paper roll inside the machine, I worked for Spanaway Lakes School during elections and helped during setup of the machines, I was very interested and it was explained to me. One big reason the voters wanted to keep these machines was the outstanding paper trail.

jcricket- sometimes hearings officers- judicial or administrative- have to recuse for appearances sake. Justice Sanders did on Monday.

It is not a matter of “giving in” to one or the other parties to a dispute. It is an imperative for maintaining the integrity of the decision-making process.

The 10% on each wing doesn’t matter- it is the eighty percent of the electorate in the middle that needs to be given confidence in the syste,m, a reason to ignore the “rage” from the losing side…

It is the eighty percent in the middle- not the Dems or Reps. That vast bulk will yearn to accept as legitimate whomever wins.

Because, believe me- the eighty percent think “the ragers” on both sides just look like damn fools who only care about winning- at any cost- instread of proving they have the right to lead by doing what is good for the many…

Jim – I agree with your comment about where most people fall (in the middle), but feel that Republicans have been very good at framing their “raging” as “common sense”. In that way, I don’t think I’ll be inclined to follow their advice. I feel pretty strongly that in this case were Dean Logan to recuse himself it would only benefit the Republicans (i.e. they’d find a way to spin it into an “admission of guilt”).

But I totally understand what you’re arguing, and in an ideal world, I’d agree.

Chuck- that was NOT a paper trail. That was a total. A total that may or may not have been accurate. People were comfortable with the machines, but the machines screwed up way too often, and when they did, you were screwed. There was NO paper trail, no way to reconstitute the ballots.

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